"The Debt to Pleasure" [.]

[fiefoe]

Given that Tarquin's philosophy is primarily based on negation, and the last illustration in the book is that of a mushroom, the reader cannot say she is not forewarned. When he finally tips his hand, one merely feels distaste.

I'll say nay to 'incurable unease' and stick to the 'lighthearted, comically incongruous' bits.

• It was the fear of seeing something that was impossible. That's why we're really frightened of ghosts: because they don't exist. So what would it mean if we saw one?
• (On Casanova:) an unacknowledged continuity between the two pursuits (seduction and librarianship), something to do with the essence of cataloguing
• ... not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac, venting himself in the easy sphere of fantasy rather than the unforgiving arena of real life-Kandinsky a failed Stalin, Klee a Barbie manqué.
  
• Like all perfect things, marble is inert.
• Are rhetorical questions the pattern of all our seeking? 
• The Marseillaise take the place of being self-consciously romantic about how realistic they are.
  
• summer leaving to join the queue of other summers
• life within the earshot of cicadas
• a burgeoning knowledge as full of itself as a plumbline is confident of its own verticality
• with that mixture of endearment and melancholy that attends the recitation of the follies of one's youth

__ "A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory." [Keats]
__ "Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism" [Walter Benjamin]
__ Thoreau's maxim to beware of any enterprise requiring new clothes
__ Alfred Jarry's perception that cliches are the armature of the absolute
__ "Shorter life, longer fame." [Careme]

A final bout of allusions: Paul Valery, G. Leopardi, Lichtenberg, Hazlitt, Fowler ('elegant variation'), Bakunin, Villon, the desert lines at Nazca, Zeno's paradox, "In Praise of Folly", Sod's law of maximum inconvenience, sprezzatura and terribilita, ABYSSUS ABYSSUM VOCAT.